Here’s the 16th Monthly Hosting Performance Contest Roundup for May 2017! I’ve been testing 15 hosts in a non-stop manner the whole month and I’ll show you you the results below. In general, this contest’s result can be featured as “The middle pricing category hosts are solid”.

By the way, you can find the latest roundups here and the performance tables and charts here.

All monitored hosts are presented in the pricing categories according to the most affordable plan they have. Also, I bought the most affordable plans available at each hosting company to test hosting performance.

Common Information

As you may already know, I’ve been monitoring the performance of some of the best hosting providers I know as well as some other well-known hosts.

In short, since 2013 I’ve been picking out great hosts judging by real users reviews, professional hosting community opinion, long honorable business experience and other factors which make a great hosting.

And I buy anonymously hosting accounts with different hosts in order to closely monitor their performance (basically, uptime checked every minute and full page load time checked every 15 minutes) using a professional monitoring service monitis.com. I buy the most basic and the cheapest plan of each hosting. You can read about my monitoring methodologyhere.

And I’m happy to share these statistics with you so that you could see how these hosts perform and who is the best from the best!

You can find some real-time performance charts on my recommended hosts page for the hosting which I’ve been recommending and monitoring.

Also, you can see real-time monitoring charts for all hosts that I am monitoring on this page. In addition, the page contains monthly historical data on hosting performance (speed, uptime, satisfactory apdex) – very interesting and useful.

Besides, you may read more information about this Hosting Performance Contest on this page. I will be adding monthly and yearly Contest results on the page too.

And other monthly Hosting Performance Contest roundups are available from here.

By the way, here’s a disclosure: There are some affiliate links on this page. In other words, I get paid if you click on the links and make a purchase. All such links open in new window/tab; no software/program will be installed to your computer. (This is a standard notice required by hosting companies.) Please note that although all hosts mentioned in this post are well-established and considered to be very good, I highly recommend not all of them. My recommended hosts are here.

May 2017 Hosting Performance Contest – Results

Here are the fifteen hosts that you can compare this month. I’ve broken down them in three groups: very affordable (below $4/mo), middle class (upto $8/mo) and more expensive ($8+/mo).

You’ll see a breakdown of hosting performance by prices in the sections below.

Let’s start from an overview of the hosting performance in the order of how the hosts performed in general regardless of how affordable or expensive the hosts are.

The winner of this month’s contest is SiteGround!. By the way, it’s one of the expensive hosts among the shared hosts I present in this Contest. In the Top-3 also go GeekStorage and StableHost.

What’s interesting about the leaders is that two of the three winners are from a middle pricing category. Also, this month the best performing host is from the expensive category – at last, it does not contradict logical expectations! 🙂

Average full page load time of SiteGround (the winner) was 1.27 seconds (it’s very fast). Its Uptime was 99.93% (very solid). My site hosted with this host was not available for 31.3 minutes during the whole month. And the host’s Satisfactory Apdex was also very high 99.89% (i.e. 99.89% of time the full page load time was less than 2.5 seconds). Impressive! All these parameters are much above the benchmarks specified for the greatest hosting performance. And since this hosting was the fastest host among the hosts which exceeded all the benchmarks determined for the greatest hosts SiteGround wins the gold medal.

SiteGround is not the most affordable host among the tested in this Contest, and it’s worth the prize! Congratulations!

GeekStorage performed in May 2017 as fast as 1.33 seconds which is superb. It was slower than the leader by just 0.05 seconds. Its uptime was perfect 100% (no downtime!). And the Satisfactory Apdex was also very high – 99.92% (99.92% of all time the speed was faster than 2.5 seconds, and of course it’s above the highest standards set for great hosting).

In May 2017 StableHost was on average as fast as 1.34 seconds that is just 0.06 seconds slower than the leader. StableHost‘s uptime was also perfect – 100% (no downtime!). And its Satisfactory Apdex was awesome – 99.6% (i.e. 99.6% of all time full page load time of my website hosted with this host was less than 2.5 seconds). Brilliant results!

HostWinds took the 4th place with 1.41 seconds speed, perfect uptime (100%) which means no downtime. Also, it had great Satisfactory Apdex (99.89%). The values are much above the highest standards set for the best hosts too. Strong performance!

A2Hosting goes to the 5th place. Its 1.65 seconds full page load time was great. Its uptime (99.95%) was very good and much above the benchmark (99.9%). My site was not available for 22.3 minutes this month. The host well passed the Satisfactory Apdex (99.57%) which was above the benchmark (99%). Very solid results!

Other hosts could not meet at least one of the benchmarks set for the best hosting. However, the results of some hosts were very close to the benchmarks and pretty good in general.

MDDHosting goes to the 6th place this month. Its performance values were almost superb. Its speed (1.09 seconds) was the best. And its Satisfactory Apdex (99.92%) was awesome and much above the value set for the great hosts. But it failed a little bit uptime (99.89%), which is just 0.01% less than the standards set for thebest performing hosts in the industry. My site was not available for 49.1 minutes this month. Rules are rules. MDDHosting could have won the gold medal. But alas!

LunarPages took the 7th place. Its 1.58 seconds full page load time was great. But its uptime (99.83%) was below the highst standards (99.9%). My site was not available for 1.26 hours this month. Satisfactory Apdex (99.57%) was very solid though and it could meet the benchmark (99%).

VeeroTech took the 8th place with 1.67 seconds speed, which is good. And it had great uptime (99.96%) this month. My site was not available for 17.9 minutes this month. The other site hosted with this hosting had even better uptime (99.99%). But the host failed a bit Satisfactory Apdex (98.82%), which is below the benchmark (99%).

GreenGeeks goes to the 9th place. Its average speed (1.82 secs) was good. But its uptime (99.51%) was not great and below the benchmark (99.9%). My site was not available for 3.65 hours this month. Also, the host’s Satisfactory Apdex (96.9%) did not meet the highest standards (99%). Both benchmarks failed this month.

MochaHost takes the 10th place.. Its speed was generally not bad (1.85 seconds). But its uptime (99.09%) was much below the benchmark (99.9%). My site was not available for 6.77 hours this month. And the host’s Satisfactory Apdex (94.24%) also did not pass the benchmark test (99%).

InMotionHosting took the 11th place. Its average speed was generally not bad (1.95 seconds full page load time). My site was not available for 31.3 minutes this month. But the host’s Satisfactory Apdex (98.46%) was a bit below the highest standards (99%). It did not pass the benchmark. Its uptime (99.93%) was great though.

Squidix goes to the 12th place with its average speed 1.99 seconds. Its uptime (99.96%) was great and very well above the benchmark (99.9%). My site was not available for 17.9 minutes this month. But the host’s Satisfactory Apdex was 89.14% (89.14% of time its Full page load time was below 2.5 seconds). It’s below the benchmark level (99%).

HawkHost took just the 13th place. Its average speed (2.09 seconds) was slower than the most of the hosts above. And its Satisfactory Apdex (88.47%) did not meet the highest standards (99%). However, its uptime was almost perfect (99.99%) and much above the highest standards (99.9%). My site was not available for just 4.5 minutes this month.

Eleven2 got the 14th place. Its average speed (2.11 secs) was lower than the above hsots but not bad. But it failed both benchmarks. Its uptime was 99.18%, which is much below the benchmark (99.9%). My site was not available for 6.1 hours this month. And the host’s Satisfactory Apdex (90.25%) could not get to the highest standards (99%) as well.

And finally, GlowHost is again on the last, 15th place. This host could not get higher because of its low speed. This month it showed good uptime (99.92%), which is above the benchmark (99.9%). My site was not available for 35.7 minutes. The host’s speed was not really good (3.18 seconds). And as expected, its Satisfactory Apdex (0%) was the lowest among other monitored hosts; and it was far from reaching the benchmark level (99%). In other words, all the time the loading time of my test website was slower than 2.5 seconds.

Generally, the competition this month revealed a little performance increasing for most of the hosts. An interesting part is that most of the hosts from the middle pricing category outperformed more expensive hosts.

By the way, keep in mind, that for this Contest I pick out the hosts which are considered to be good, great and superb. These hosts are established businesses for many years and some of them are widely recommended in the Internet. So, the idea of this Contest is to determine the best performing hosts from a technical point of view, giving you objective information for making your own decision regarding hosts.

Let’s see now the results in tables and charts for more convenience, more information and more insight.

Here’s a table view to compare the Hosting Performance Contest results in May 2017:

Table column notes:Place: The place a hosting has won in this Contest (the less the better).Load Time: Average Full Page Load Time (the less the better). Checked every 15 minutes.Uptime: Uptime (the more the better). Checked every minute.Superb Uptime: If Uptime Benchmark (99.9%) passed (YES is very good).Apdex-S: Satisfactory Apdex, i.e. how often a test website on a tested hosting was loading faster than 2.5 sec (the more the Apdex-S the better). Checked every 15 minutes.Superb Apdex-S: If Satisfactory Apdex benchmark (99%) passed (YES is very good).Color areas:Green is superb and above the highest standards. The greener, the better. Yellow is good, but below the highest standards. Orange is not very good; worse than yellow. Red is comparatively the worst.

Here’s a table with hosting prices:

1 year: Regular prices (after the first invoice) for 1-year plan.2 years: Regular prices (after the first invoice) for 2-year plan.3 years: Regular prices (after the first invoice) for 3-year plan.Min Price: The minimum price officially available for the first invoice (can be for 1-year, 2-year or 3-year plan). *StableHost discount code is given in my review.Limited-time offers with more discounts are not included in these prices. Check out if there are special offers currently available by visiting the hosting websites.Worthy: This column contains my recommended hosts. (Under review label means that the host performs well or/and has a good potential in winning prizes in the Contest, but I want to have more proved records of its technical and support performance.)

Here’s a table with places within pricing categories:

Since it’s not always correct to compare hosts from different price categories together, I’ve broken down the monitored hosts into three categories to compete within as you can see above in the table.

The prices presented in this table are regular prices (i.e. applied after the first invoice). Note that prices for the first invoice (1-,2- or 3-year plan) are usually less (see them in the previous table). And special promo prices are not included (check them out on the hosting websites).

And here are the charts with the Hosting Performance Contest results in May 2017:

May 2017 Hosting Performance Contest Results – Notes

I use monitis.com services for uptime and full page load monitoring. The monitoring is performed from two locations in order to decrease chances of false alerts and make monitoring results more objective. You can read more about my methodology of monitoring here.

Here are the monthly monitoring reports screenshots:

These monitor checks are performed with 1-minute interval, which makes it great for detecting website uptime and downtime.

So, we need Uptime values from this table for finding the winner of our Contest. By the way, downtime is detected if server response time (time-to-first-byte) is more than 10 seconds.

Other values (just for information): – Response time is not that important for this Contest, because I’ve got a better indicator monitored, which is Full page load time (see below). – Number of failures may be interesting to look at, but this is just an additional information to Uptime, which is more important for the overall hosting evaluation.

Only five last hosts on the screenshot have not passed the uptime benchmark test for great hosting. The other hosts I’m monitoring were up more than 99.9% in May. Websites on the uptime-failed hosting were not available for more than 44.6 minutes in total this month.

These tests are performed with 15-minute interval. It makes it a perfect real-user performance monitor. This monitor’s activity is equal to 192 unique visitors per day (about 5,760 unique visitors per month).

Avg Test Duration is the Full page load time, which is very clear and important factor for the Hosting Performance Contest.

We don’t need Uptime from this table because we have got a better (more precise) Uptime indicator from the previous table.

Also, we don’t need Failures from this table, because it’s less precise than the same indicator from the previous table.

But we will need Apdex, particularly its S (Satisfactory) part. This shows how much time (in %) the website loaded faster than 2.5 seconds.

Conclusion

The best hosts which have demonstrated the best performance in May 2017 are the medalists: SiteGround, GeekStorage and StableHost. Two of the three hosts are from the middle pricing category.

By the way, all the top winners have passed the strict benchmarks determined for great hosting.

As regards the winners in different pricing categories, here they are:The best hosts in the higher pricing category ($8-10/mo) in May 2017 go in the following order: SiteGround, A2Hosting and InMotionHosting.

By the way, SiteGround outperformed other expensive hosts by quite a good speed differnece.

Please note, that I’m using the cheapest plans available on each of the monitored hosts.

It’s interesting that many hosts from the middle and even lower pricing category outperformed some hosts from the higher pricing category.

P.S.: Past and future Hosting Performance Contest results are (and will be) published on this page. Also, you can see real-time performance charts of the hosts I monitor as well as historical data on the hosting performance on this page.Other monthly roundups of this Hosting Performance Contest are available here. And my recommended hosts are here.

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I hope you enjoyed the article! You can read my free researches on resources and tools for bloggers and small business owners on this website. By the way, if we haven't met before - my name is Michael Bely.

Hi Amir, I believe that Vultr, Linode and DO performance is generally better than most shared hosts if we compare plans with the same prices. The point is that using these services requires the skills to manage your own VPS. Update: I’ve not used the native plan of the host you mentioned. But I guess it could be on-par with the above services.